In Polls, Much Opposition to Health Care Plan Is From Left

Don't know why I didn't catch this earlier, but it strikes me as fairly important.

Ipsos/McClatchy put out a health care poll two weeks ago. The topline results were nothing special: 34 percent favored "the health care reform proposals presently being discussed", versus 46 percent opposed, and 20 percent undecided. The negative-12 net score is roughly in line with the average of other polls, although the Ipsos poll shows a higher number of undecideds than most others.

Ipsos, however, did something that no other pollster has done. They asked the people who opposed the bill why they opposed it: because they are opposed to health care reform and thought the bill went too far? Or because they support health care reform but thought the bill didn't go far enough?

It turns out that a significant minority of about 25 percent of the people who opposed the plan -- or about 12 of the overall sample -- did so from the left; they thought the plan didn't go far enough.

Ipsos also asked a parallel question of people who supported the plan: did any of them support the plan because they oppose health care reform and thought that the plan was sufficiently watered-down so as to "keep health care reform from happening"? A small number of people picked this response: about 10 percent of those in favor of the plan, or 3 percent of the entire sample.

Combining these numbers together, we get the following:



One way to look at this: 43 percent of people favor health care reform, whereas 38 percent oppose it (20 percent are undecided). But the actual plan under consideration gets numbers that are more or less the reverse of that -- 34 percent in favor, 46 percent opposed -- because a significant number of people think the plan doesn't go far enough.

Now, a lot of polls have shown that people favor the concept of health care reform, even if they don't support the actual plan under consideration. So that finding, taken unto itself, is not that noteworthy. But the conventional wisdom -- and certainly my assumption -- has been that people oppose the plan because it's too liberal. In fact, some of the opposition seems to stem from the fact that the plan is not liberal enough. This would help to explain, for example, why polls show majorities (sometimes fairly sizable ones) in favor of the public option, but also pluralities or majorities opposed to the overall plan.

Some caveats, certainly, are necessarily. Ipsos' question wording is somewhat ambiguous. For example, among those opposed to the plan, they didn't provide a clear way to distinguish those who support health care reform but think the plan goes too far, from those who are opposed to health care reform in general. So it doesn't necessarily follow that the plan would have better numbers if it were more liberal (by containing a robust public option, etc.)

What's less ambiguous, however, is that a significant fraction of the opposition to the health care bill comes from the left, and that opposition is almost certainly holding its polling numbers down overall.

One interesting question, certainly, is what would happen to that 12 percent of the electorate that opposes the bill from the left if the Democrats in fact manage to get a bill passed (but one that "compromises" on the public option and other issues). What would liberal thought leaders -- Howard Dean, Jay Rockefeller, Raul Grijalva, Jane Hamsher, Rachel Maddow, et. al. -- say about the bill once it received the President's signature? And would Obama tip his hat to the left, rather than the right, at the signing ceremony? My guess is that some of that 12 percent would peel off fairly easily -- although, to be clear, my perspective on this is as someone who thinks the bill is pretty decent as is.

With that said, I also think the White House's positioning on this the public option has been questionable. There's a middle ground between a world in which the White House would have insisted that the inclusion of a public option was a non-negotiable part of health care reform, and their actual positioning, which has been transparently indifferent toward it. In other words, run the bluff -- and make the left happy -- and then if you have to give up on the bluff at some point to get a bill passed, do some play-acting and look really unhappy about it. Give a big speech, say your hand was forced by the necessity to get such an important bill passed and your desire to reach common ground, blah, blah, blah. Some on the left, certainly, would look upon you cynically if you did this -- but probably fewer than if you hadn't seemed to care about the public option in the first place (i.e. what has happened in the the status quo). Meanwhile, you might have picked up a few points with independents for your apparent willingness to compromise.

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538 --> Copenhagen

Tomorrow afternoon, I'll be flying off for three nights to chilly Copenhagen, Denmark, where I'll be getting the lay of the land at the COP15 UN climate change conference.

The trip is dual purpose: I'm hoping to get a more tangible sense of the intersections between domestic and international politics on the climate change issue for purposes of this blog, and I'm also hoping to knock out a few interviews for my book, which will include extensive material on climate change forecasting.

Apart from that -- I figure it will mostly be a lot of watching and listening. And I've never been to Denmark or anywhere else in Scandinavia before, so sampling some of the local beer/food/etc. is also on the agenda.

Posting times will be a bit irregular for the next week. If you need to reach me, however, I should be online rather frequently, subject to the time zone difference. I do still have some interview slots free, so if you have suggestions on people at your organization I ought to speak with -- or are yourself someone I ought to speak with -- please don't hesitate to contact me.

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Some Key Nuggets of the Afghanistan Strategy Speech

Much of the commentary about President Obama's speech on Afghanistan and the ensuing deployment of US troops has been focused on either the politics of the decision (troop bump up, then phased withdrawal) or the feasibility of the "COIN" strategy to make progress against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

However, there are a few points -- a bit more buried -- that are perhaps quite important.

1. Public support for the creation of the "Contact Group for Afghanistan and Pakistan": Buried at the end of a sentence at the end of the speech, Obama discusses the creation of a new working group of sorts with several regional powers. The biggest departure from past practice is the public inclusion of Iran in this group, who have been marginalized generally, for reasons of US general policy and accusations of selling weapons to the Taliban. While little has changed in the former, the latter has cooled a bit; Shia Iran has many axes to grind with the fundamentalist Sunni Taliban. In fact, Iran nearly invaded Afghanistan in the late 1990s for various reasons, including the killing of several Iranian diplomats.

The "contact group" concept is not new -- the Germans came up with it a while back, with the support of top US military personnel -- but it has received little support from the wider US foreign policy and political communities.

2. "But this is not simply an American problem": Previous incarnations of the US President rallying behind a war strategy have often cast issues in terms of US interests, moral requirement and the spread of American ideals. Indeed, the main thrust of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been directly against the operators -- those who the US considered to be security threats.

Spending diplomatic and economic capital to re-couch the Afghanistan threat in global terms, a la climate change or poverty, is an important strategic decision. Al Qaeda et al. are funded from various sources, recruit from various places, and carry out activities in still other places. If the US intention is to weaken the whole network, Obama is saying publicly, the effort must be integrated rather than treated discretely.

This was attempted by George W. Bush by way of the "Global War on Terror" and "coalition of the willing" rhetoric, but it was always an obviously American-led show.

All the same, two key issues that remain unanswered and unresolved:

1. What happens, in practical terms, after the new US/NATO/UN strategy succeeds or fails?
Afghanistan has had many instances of foreign occupation, exit and power vacuum in the last hundred years, and particularly in the last thirty-five. Let's briefly have a look:


Bottom line, when the power vacuum emerges following the eventual departure of the US and its allies, who will fill it? In fact, the higher military power of the occupation that will be there when (projected) withdrawal occurs in 2011 could amplify the differential. In the past, inter- and intra- ethnic and party fighting has followed the exit of major foreign influence in the country. Even with a stronger central government, it is likely to happen again. The US and allies had better come up with a good plan.

2. The US reputation of militarism and occupation:

The fact is, even with the election of a more globally popular President, the US continues to have a reputation abroad of taking unilateral, hegemonical and militaristic decisions, with myopic and/or selfish thinking to drive them. Regardless of the veracity of the charge, this image is well embedded.

This problem of reputation, along with major problems of global poverty, backlash against globalization and the Anglo-American liberalization model that has dominated since the Uraguay round of trade talks (GATT and WTO) and the ability of militant ideas and money to fund them to move rapidly in today's information age, has left the US between a rock and hard place.

Military action against those marked "enemy" has only further embedded the ideas that drove these individuals towards violence to begin with. Even if the American/European strategy of eliminating violent enemies with global connections in Afghanistan and Pakistan succeed, these more entrenched problems will remain unresolved.

The Obama administration has done a credible attempt to thread this needle, with a mix of reaching out to Iran, adding additional military firepower, putting diplomatic pressure on the Afghan government and setting time limits for the US engagement. However, if the transition is to be successful, reaching out in a significant way to the traditionalist Pashtos from whom the Taliban rose will be necessary (including the Taliban themselves). In addition, combating the overarching problem of globalized distrust of the US in sensitive areas, including the aforementioned growing skepticism of the US-exported liberal economic model, will have to play a small but vital role.

---
Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international columnist and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com

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Improving Unemployment Numbers Make Political Case for Jobs Bill Stronger, Not Weaker

Paul Krugman is worried that the today's relatively good employment situation report -- just 11,000 jobs were lost, and the unemployment rate (which is calculated from a different set of data) dipped nominally from 10.2 to 10.0 percent -- may deter Congressional action on a jobs bill that might push that number down further.

Perhaps Paul is right -- no one has a keener sense of the ways in which political factors have become endogenous parts of the economic equation. But the Democrats would be silly if they failed to take action on a jobs bill. The economy, needless to say, is a long ways from full employment and will continue to be so for a very long time -- a bill that reduced unemployment by, say, 1.0 percent for a period of 18 months would not encounter diminishing returns. Indeed, since most of the improvement in the numbers seems to have come because employers have stopped firing people, but have not actually begun to hire new staff in great numbers, job-creation incentives would work somewhat at the other end of the candle.

Nor, certainly, ought the employment numbers to weaken the political case for jobs bill. You can look at the politics of job creation in essentially two ways: either there is a roughly linear relationship between the unemployment numbers and the number of seats that Democrats will retain in the Congress, or there are some sort of threshold effects. If the former, then the case is not changed at all. A bill that would create 2 million new jobs and save 13 seats in the Congress will still create 2 million new jobs and save 13 seats, regardless of the starting point.

In the latter case, the outcomes are more binary: the Democrats' job creation efforts will either tend to be branded as a "success" or a "failure", and their performance at the midterms will follow accordingly. But if there is more organic momentum in the jobs market, that makes it less likely that the Democrats pass a "successful" jobs creation bill but fail to get credit for it. For example, suppose that a jobs bill reduces unemployment by 1 percent relative to the status quo. If the status quo unemployment figure were headed upward to 10.8 percent, this would only get things down to 9.8 percent -- and the Democrats' policies would probably be branded as a failure. But suppose instead that status quo unemployment is headed downward to 9.3 percent by next summer. Now the jobs bill would get things down to 8.3 percent, and they'd come out looking pretty good. With more of a wind at their backs, then, the Democrats will have the same reward but with perhaps considerably less risk.

Plus, there are the intangible benefits to pushing a jobs bill forward: Republicans will either have to help the Democrats get the jobs numbers down and give Obama a "bipartisan" victory, or they'll oppose the bill and risk looking like out-of-touch hypocrites. It's not like they'll be eager to say that the economy is actually recovering and therefore does not need a jobs bill, which would tacitly acknowledge the success of the Democrats' original stimulus. In contrast to the politics of health care, where the Democrats are damned if they do and damned if they don't, something the opposite is true on the jobs program. (Unless the White House and the Congress really screw up the strategizing -- a possibility we would be foolish to neglect.)

Meanwhile, it would help to get the Democratic base excited. If the base is weighing, say, health care reform without a public option, a decent financial regulation package, and the various stimulus efforts passed by the Congress this spring on the one hand, versus Afghanistan, Bernanke/Geithner, and inaction in areas like gay rights and climate change on the other, it could very easily be the presence or absence of a jobs bill that tips the balance in terms of enthusiasm.

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World Cup 2010 Advancement Probabilities

I'm just going to run the raw numbers for you here, as calculated based on the Soccer Power Index. An article with additional explanation and analysis will be up on ESPN.com momentarily.



Most favorable draws -- chances of advancement improved the most by the actual draw relative to all possible combinations:

1. Paraguay (F), +21%
2. Italy (F), +20%
3. Slovakia (F), +14%
4. USA (C), +6%
5. Nigeria (B), +4%

Least favorable draws, using the same formula.

1. Ivory Coast (G), -11%
2. South Africa (A), -10%
3. Switzerland (H), -8%
4. Chile (H), -8%
5. Portugal (G), -7%

Update: But which country has the toughest draw in an absolute sense -- rather than relative to expectations going in? We can look at this by replacing each of the 32 teams in our program with an average World Cup side and seeing how often the average team would advance. The lower the number, the tougher the draw.

1. North Korea (G): 25.9%
2. Japan (E): 36.3%
3. Switzerland (H) 37.6%
4. Honduras (H): 38.2%
5. Portugal (G): 39.9%
6. Denmark (E): 40.2%
7. Ivory Coast (G): 41.1%
8. *South Africa (A): 43.4%
9. Australia (D): 44.1%
10. Algeria (C): 44.2%
11. Slovenia (C): 44.3%
12. Mexico (A): 44.6%
13. Ghana (D): 45.1%
14. South Korea (B): 46.2%
15. Serbia (D): 46.2%
16. Chile (H): 46.5%
17. Cameroon (E): 47.0%
18. Greece (B): 47.9%
19. USA (C): 48.3%
20. *Netherlands (E): 49.3%
21: *Brazil (G): 49.5%
22: France (A): 50.3%
23. *Germany (D): 50.3%
24. Uruguay (A): 50.7%
25. *Spain (H): 53.1%
26. Nigeria (B): 54.9%
27. New Zealand (F): 56.7%
28. *England (C): 57.1%
29. *Argentina (B): 59.9%
30. Slovakia (F): 61.3%
31. Paraguay (F): 77.8%
32. *Italy (F): 78.5%

Brazil's draw, for instance, although unlucky relative to most of the other combinations they might ended up with, is not actually that bad because they don't have to play themselves. South Africa wound up with the roughest draw from among the seeds and Italy -- by far -- the easiest. North Korea has the toughest draw of anybody, but considering how backward that country is and how lucky they were to qualify, I can't say I have much sympathy.

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Gaming Out GOP 2012 Scenarios

What's so fascinating about the GOP 2012 presidential race, as discussed yesterday, is just how wide open the field is. I was trying to think of a simple way to make this point in a comparative way. This is what came to me: Last cycle there were a lot of Democrats, but it was effectively a three-person race between Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. You could be--what?--maybe 95 percent certain that the nominee would be one of those three. Can you say that about any combination three Republican aspirants right now?

In short, a lot of scenarios could play out in the next two years. Herewith a first crack at some of them and who may end up the winner of each:

The Next-in-Line scenario. Traditionally, the Republican nomination goes to the "next man in line." Trouble is, it’s hard to figure out who that next man is--or if it even is a man. Is Sarah Palin next in line by virtue of her ’08 vice presidential candidacy, or are Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney, given the number of states they picked up in last year’s primaries? Or is that old hand, Newt Gingrich, the Republican who becomes the default option by virtue of his past electoral achievements? If I had to guess, the person that best fits the next-in-line profile is Romney: Though Huckabee held on longer last year once McCain burst ahead, Romney dutifully got out of the way once he knew he couldn’t win and helped McCain raise money. If he were not Mormon, I'd be even surer of it.

The Base Prevails scenario, Palin version. Well, if 2012 is the kind of year where the GOP determines to start anew and throw caution to the wind by rebuilding from the base up, you have to think Palin is the likely choice. Second option is obviously Huckabee, though as I mentioned yesterday the opportunity costs for him to run have perhaps increased.

The Base Prevails scenario, sans Palin. After Sarah Palin gets her national TV program, the GOP base will need to turn somewhere once they turn off their sets. What’s interesting about this scenario is that Huckabee is the obvious fallback position. But if for some reason—again, we’re just gaming things out here—neither of them ran, what would happen? I really don’t think both with sit it out, but at point does Haley Barbour emerge as somebody who can talk that southern talk and still keep the business and Washington wings in line, or does the GOP realize that a former lobbyist is not the image they want? After the protests of 2009, the base will need to be accommodated somehow, and the vice presidential slot in a tanking presidential campaign, like last time, may not be enough.

The Big-Business Man scenario. If the business wing of the Republican Party feels as threatened as tea party types do by Obama-inspired "socialism"--and given their bailouts and the general socializing of risk in America, I'm guessing Wall Street is far less worried than the tea partiers who shout about "socialism" as they march down to their mailboxes to collect their OADSI checks--Big Business could push their chips all-in with Romney. Huckabee's flat-tax ideas are not going to be taken that seriously, and there's little indication that Palin has much of an idea how to handle post-bubble American economy.

The Republican Jimmy Carter scenario. The Republicans are changing their nomination rules, and who knows how that might affect the contest. Given how little unity there is, there has to be at least one scenario in which a relatively but not totally unknown governor emerges. This has to be the hope of the Tim Pawlenty crowd.

The Militarist scenario: For all our justifiable focus on the economy, it's possible that Iraq and Afghanistan could continue to be political trouble for Obama by 2012. There could be major terrorism incidents abroad and, heaven forfend, at home. Notice that the list of possible Republican nominees is rather lacking in foreign policy and military credentials, now that McCain is out of the mix. This is another reason to keep an eye on Gingrich, who looks like Colin Powell among the current field of aspirants. But it is also reason to consider the possibility that some retired general or person with strong military cred could announce and compete.

The Empire Strikes Back scenario. Two words: Jeb Bush. His name is curiously absent from all these discussions, but let’s face it: He always was the smarter, more talented, and more secular of the Bush brothers. He’s got the Latino wife. He would be able to raise the money to be remain competitive against what could be a $1 billion Obama operation--and I wonder if any candidate other than Palin or Romney can possibly compete. And, of course, Bush would pose a problem for Democrats in Florida. Yes, the elder brother did way too much brand damage not only to the GOP but the Bush family, and Obama’s victory in last year’s primary was aided by anti-dynasty sentiments. But two years is a long time from now.

I'm sure there are plenty of other ways to game it out, so feel free to add your own scenarios to the list.

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Maine Revisited: Is There a Backlash Against Same-Sex Marriage?

In light of the New York State Senate's decision on Wednesday to vote down gay marriage, I've been thinking a little bit more about what happened last month in Maine, where voters passed Question 1 -- reversing the state legislature's decision to allow for gay marriage -- by roughly a 5-point margin.

We had previously developed a statistical model, based on the result of ballot initiatives in other states, which predicted that gay marriage would most likely be upheld in Maine. The model was somewhat well hedged, giving itself as much as a 1 in 3 chance of being wrong depending on what assumptions were made. Nevertheless, this was certainly a disappointing result -- from both a policy and a forecasting perspective -- especially considering that the vote wasn't actually all that close. It's one that's worth a little self-reflection.

There are essentially three conclusions that we might come to in evaluating the model's performance:

1) It was a basically good model that got a little "unlucky";
2) It was a poorly specified model that missed important factors in play in Maine;
3) It was a decent enough model, but missed some sort of national backlash against gay marriage.

The third conclusion is tempting in light of what happened in New York. But there's not a lot of evidence for it. Back in March, the last time we did a systematic review of gay marriage polling, we found an average of about 41 percent of Americans in support of full marriage rights. Since then, there have been nine polls on gay marriage, which have shown, respectively, 49, 46, 45, 44, 41, 40, 39, 38, and 35 percent support for gay marriage. You see a pattern there? I don't. It works out to an average of 42, exactly in line with our previous estimate. (Nor is there any particular trendline in the data: the two most recent polls, from NBC/WSJ and AP-GfK, showed gay marriage with 41 and 46 percent support respectively.)

In addition, on the same day that Maine voted down gay marriage, voters in Washington State approved Referendum 71, which greatly expanded domestic partnership rights. And as for New York, we should remember that this was a decision of the state legislature rather than anticipated many months ago.

So maybe the model was just "unlucky" -- we did hedge our bets, after all. This conclusion, as always, is tempting. I was rather fond of the model: it was simple and intuitive and yet had a lot of explanatory power. Those are the sorts of models I tend to trust the most (whether I develop them myself or someone else does).

But it has since occurred to me that there was one important factor that the model may have missed -- something I'd mentioned in passing but not thought seriously about. In Maine, in contrast to every other state that voted on gay marriage, there was not a constitutional question at stake. Question 1 did not amend the state's constitution; it merely 'vetoed' the law that the legislature had passed. Maine's Supreme Judicial Court could rule tomorrow that gay marriage was protected by the state's constitution and gay marriage would again become legal there. Although I'm not certain about this, it also appears that the legislature could again approve gay marriage whenever it wanted. In 1998, for example, a law to ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation was overturned by people's veto in Maine. But a nearly-identical law was passed in 2005 -- it went through the people's veto process again, but this time was upheld.

Does this make a difference? Because Question 1 was the first gay marriage ballot initiative not to impact its state's constitution, there is no good comparable at the state level. But some national numbers suggest that it the wording of the initiative might have mattered.

There were five polls conducted in 2008 that asked about a federal Constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage (nobody has asked this question so far in 2009, so these are the most recent results). And those polls showed that the Constitutional amendment idea was not so popular, with an average of 40 percent of voters in favor versus 54 percent opposed:



Now, compare these numbers to those that we described earlier. Whereas a 54 percent majority opposes an amendment to ban gay marriage (versus 40 percent in favor), a 53 percent majority -- between the last nine national polls -- also oppose allowing gay marriage (versus 42 percent in favor).

What that means is that there's a "swing vote" of about 10 percent of the electorate that is not yet ready to allow gay marriage, but is also not willing to ban it (at least not Constitutionally). This is enough to tip the national balance on the question of gay marriage. And it may have tipped the balance in Maine. Question 1 did not actually ban gay marriage but rather overturned the legislature's affirmation of it.

I realize that this will seem like a semantic distinction, but such distinctions are frequently important in polling and it stands to reason that they might be important for ballot initiatives as well. Besides, the distinction is not entirely semantic; since constitutional amendments have a higher bar to clear in Maine, requiring the approval of 2/3 of the legislature in addition to a majority of the people.

Here, in any event, is what I think we can and cannot say in light of the recent results.

Firstly, I don't think there is any evidence of a national backlash against gay marriage. It should be borne in mind that gay marriage is still opposed by a small majority or large plurality of Americans. But there's not really any evidence that the numbers are getting worse; instead, they appear to be v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y getting better.

Secondly, it's not clear that the results in Maine are comparable to those in other states. Question 1 was the only gay marriage ballot initiative that did not seek to rewrite its state's constitution. If Question 1 had addressed the same question as Proposition 8 in California, which did alter its state's constitution, it might not have passed.

Thirdly, building statistical models is tricky. It is good practice to model one's uncertainty whenever we are forecasting a result. But very often, there is uncertainty about the uncertainty.

In Maine, we had a "known unknown" -- I knew that the nature of the ballot initiative was different as compared with other states. But there was no particularly good way to model the uncertainty. And so I did what most people do and ignored it.

Ironically, known unknowns are often tougher to deal with than unknown unknowns. We know we can't know everything. But because this type of uncertainty is inevitable, we have a host of statistical techniques to handle it; it is essentially what is accounted for by the standard error of a forecast. But sometimes, we know there's an additional factor or two in play -- something that contributes to greater-than-average uncertainty -- but we just don't know how to quantify it. There is not much we can do in these cases but be prepared to be wrong.

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World Cup Draw Preview

OK, here's a little something for the overnight/European crowd. This summer, I helped ESPN to create something called the Soccer Power Index (SPI), which made its official debut last month. One of the cool features of the SPI is that it's designed to allow you to calculate the win/loss/draw possibilities between any two clubs based on their respective ratings. With a little bit of additional programming, we can use this to run all sorts of fun statistics on the World Cup Draw, which will take place today in South Africa (noon Eastern time) and assign the 32 teams between eight groups. Anyway, there's much more detail in my article over at ESPN.com, although we'll provide a teaser/Cliff's Notes version here. Soccer fans -- read on! Everyone else, go merrily on your way and ignore the World's Favorite Sport.

The draw, indeed, is very important -- with the possible exception of the NBA draft lottery in a year where you have someone like LeBron available, I can't think of too many other sporting events in which random luck so profoundly affects a team's fortunes. For example, given it's best possible draw (South Africa, Slovakia and Paraguay), the United States would have a 63 percent chance of reaching the knockout stage ("playoffs", for those Americans in the audience). But given its toughest possible draw -- Brazil, Côte d'Ivoire, and Portugal -- those odds would drop all the way to 25 percent. England is 94 percent to advance with a dream draw of New Zealand, Algeria and Slovakia, but 69 percent against a nightmare draw of the USA, Portugal, and Ivory Coast. Ivory Coast, for their part, could be anywhere from 89 percent to 48 percent depending on their draw -- you get the picture.

What you will see in the tables below is a series of statistics for each of the 4 'Pots' that FIFA draws from. Each World Cup group will consist of one team drawn from each pot, subject to a few additional geographical restrictions (for example, there can't be more than two teams from Africa or South America in the same group). The statistics presented are as follows:

Rank: Each team's SPI ranking among all international clubs.
Rate: Each team's SPI rating; these numbers run from a 0 to 100 scale.
OFF: Each team's offensive rating, which can be roughly interpreted as how many goals a team would be expected to score against an "average" worldwide club ("average" in this case meaning a team like Canada or Iraq.)
DEF: Each team's defensive rating, using the same scale; lower numbers are better.
Impact: This is the effect a team will have on its group opponents' chances of advancing to the knockout stage. For example, Brazil's impact is a minus-6 percent, meaning that if a team happens to draw the Brazilians (as opposed to another, randomly selected team from Pot 1), its odds of making it to the knockout stage are reduced, on average, by about 6 percent.
Advance %: This reflects each team's chances of reaching the knockout stage if they draw an average opponent from each of the other three groups, subject to the geographical restrictions as described above. Once the draw takes place, we will re-calculate these numbers based on the actual groups, to see who got lucky and unlucky.

First, here's Pot 1:



This is the seeded pot -- essentially what FIFA considers to be the seven best teams in the World, plus the host, South Africa. SPI actually thinks they've gotten six of the seven seeds right, the only difference being Italy (SPI would take Portugal instead). But since the Italians are the defending World Champions and as other rating systems have them scored more favorably, it's very hard to render a complaint about this one.

Then there's South Africa, who are probably the worst team ever to host the World Cup. We don't have historical SPI ratings, but looking at a different ratings system called ELO instead: the worst team prior to South Africa to have hosted the Cup was probably either the United States (which came into the 1994 tournament with a rating of 1591) or Switzerland (a 1616 rating in 1954). South Africa is rated quite a ways behind at 1508. So, while everyone else will draw one of the best teams in the world, three lucky contestants will instead get South Africa -- whom we have ranked 65th. With that said, the match against South Africa won't be quite as easy at looks, because home field advantage is very important in international soccer. Hence, as weak as they are, between home field advantage and the way the draw is stacked in their favor, South Africa has nearly even odds of advancing.

Now, here's Pot 2:



The relatively good teams in this group -- the United States, Australia and Mexico -- get kind of screwed over because they don't have access to some of the very weak Asian and Oceania teams that make up the bottom of the pool (particularly North Korea and New Zealand). Indeed, the United States will need a nearly-perfect draw to avoid facing two or three really tough opponents in the group stage.

Pot 3:



If you don't follow international soccer regularly, you might not recognize how strong this pot is. That's because it contains the other five African qualifiers, and there is strong evidence of not just home-field advantage but also home-continent advantage in the World Cup. Thus, a team like Ivory Coast, which is already very good, becomes an elite team in South Africa, while a merely-decent team in Ghana, who would ordinarily be considered a rather favorable draw, becomes quite tough. Matters are made worse by the fact that three South American teams that round out the group are also very good.

Lastly, Pot 4:



This looks a bit like a Rick Steves itinerary. Anyway, there's a pretty big divide here between Portugal and France -- who are not far behind most of the teams in Pot 1 -- and some of the teams toward the bottom of the group, particularly Slovakia. Denmark, which is about as average as it gets compared to the rest of the field, is sort of my benchmark team for the World Cup. Is your team good enough to beat Denmark? Then it's probably good enough to advance to the playoffs knockout stage. Unfortunately, the United States just lost to the Danes 3-1 in a friendly two weeks ago and looked dispirited in doing so.

There's a lot more analysis over at ESPN, so I hope you'll click on and read my piece over there.

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The Very Open GOP Field

The Washington Post ran an article in conjunction with a new poll it conducted about the 2012 Republican presidential field. With all the Afghanistan focus—and an unusually busy week on campus—I just haven’t had time to sit down and think about the poll results until now.

The poll shows a highly fractured Republican electorate. Asked who best reflects the “core values of the Republican Party,” none of the names surveyed received more than 18 percent support, with Sarah Palin leading at that level, followed by John McCain (13 percent), Mike Huckabee (7 percent), Mitt Romney (6 percent), and Newt Gingrich (4 percent). “Other” got 23 percent and “No leader/no opinion” got a whopping 28 percent. Tim Pawlenty couldn’t have been too happy he didn’t rate at all, even if he claims otherwise and now seems to want to seize the darkhorse role.

What to make of these results and, moreover, what do they tell us about the possibilities for the 2012 GOP presidential primary? With all the usual caveats about how far out we are—although I should remind readers that the so-called “invisible primary” has in some senses already begun, and regular Iowa and New Hampshire visits will start in about 11 months—the obvious conclusion is that the GOP is presently leaderless. This doesn’t mean there aren’t leaders or leadership, a frame national Democrats are all-too-happy to insert. It’s just that there is no obvious star, and barely something close to an heir apparent. Subtract out the 13 percent share given to McCain, the party’s 2008 nominee, by reflex, and Bush’s laughable 1 percent, and you have only 35 percent of Republicans naming somebody who is a potential contender for the 2012 nomination. Some of that 23 percent for “Other” include names, like Pawlenty's, of possible candidates, but still.

Tomorrow, I’m going to do a bit more 2012 speculation—scenarios where this or that candidate emerges as the new face/identity of the GOP—but for the moment, I mostly want to raise a few points about the poll.

The obvious starting point is Palin. If 18 percent is a small number, it’s large by comparison to the rest of the field. This may not make me feel more comfortable about my bet with Nate, but her support represents a fixed, core group of cultural conservatives who love her and are going to be with her if she runs. Put another way, because she attracts those who are intense and likely to commit early, I don’t think that as the 60 or so percent who didn’t name anyone start to line up they will do so in the proportions that those four names got in this Post poll. That is, Palin's support is deep but not necessarily wide. As the Post's Dan Balz notes in an analytical follow-up to the Post's cover story pegged to the poll, Palin "has particular appeal to the loyal followers of Limbaugh and Beck, two of the most popular conservative talk show hosts in the country." No shocker there, of course, but remember that the votes of those who roguely commit early and earnestly still count the same as those who are taking a wait-and-see attitude. An intense vote from an early adopter and a reluctant vote from a late adopter count the same: once. Just ask Howard Dean.

Second, I’m surprised Huckabee didn’t do better, especially given how strongly he finished in 2008, and despite having so few resources. To me, he’s the real wild card in the 2012 race. Why? Two reasons. First, if he does run, he complicates and threatens Palin’s possible bid more than anyone else. Second, figuring out the calculus of whether he runs or not in the first place is tricky. He seems to like doing TV, and by next year the opportunity costs for him to run in 2012 may be too high.

Finally, I have to say something about Gingrich. Though my politics don’t much line up with his, I like Gingrich. You may think his big ideas are kooky, and some are, but at least he has big ideas. He’s a thinker. He also knows something how the government in Washington actually runs (and not to foolishly shut it down)--unlike the rest of the field, including Romney. And the fact that a politician who lost his last substantive electoral job over a decade ago can still register 4 percent—a small share until you consider that Huckabee and Romney, who were in the national spotlight just a year or so ago, got little more—says something about his staying power. The other thing about Gingrich: He personally went down in flames, but unlike GWBush, who ruined the modern GOP’s brand and destroyed its majorities, the congressional majorities Gingrich, more than any other Republican brought to Washington, were still intact when he exited political stage right. Also, and despite his potentially backfiring move of supporting Dede Scozzafava over Doug Hoffman in the GOP’s moment-of-truth NY23 House special election, Gingrich is the one guy in the field who has sufficient legitimacy among both the Washington/policy/insider wing of the party and the base/cultural/heartland conservative wing to unify the Republicans. Something in my gut says he’s a guy not to ignore.

Anyway, I will game this out a little more—contextualizing the race based on some assumptions about the state of the economy and politics by 2011-12; who decides to run and who doesn’t; and what the GOP primary electorate looks like—tomorrow. In the interim, I'm curious to hear readers thoughts about the poll and its meaning.

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Poll Finds Widespread Apathy Among Black Voters

A Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll released last week has rightly received a lot of attention for its stark rendering of the 'enthusiasm gap'. Whereas 81 percent of Republicans, the poll found, plan to definitely or probably vote in the 2010 midterms, the percentage is just 56 percent among Democrats. If those percentages hold up, the Democrats' advantage on the generic ballot is flipped from a +5 all the way to a -4, which could translate to catastrophic losses in the House.

The racial demographics, however, are perhaps even more striking. Whereas 68 percent of white voters told Research 2000 they were definitely or probably planning to vote in 2010, just 33 percent of black voters did. Although whites have almost always turned out at greater rates than blacks, the racial gap has never been nearly that large, and indeed was at its smallest-ever levels in 2008 with Barack Obama on the ballot.



The highest turnout gap since 1978 -- 13.0 points -- came in 1994, an inauspicious year for Democrats, when 50.1 percent of white adults turned out versus 37.1 percent of blacks. The smallest gap came last year -- 64.8 percent of whites voted versus 60.8 percent of African-Americans.

It's commonly assumed that the race gap tends to be larger in midterm years and smaller in Presidential elections -- but there's not actually that much evidence that this is the case. Since 1978, the gap has been 9.4 percent on average in midterm elections and 9.0 percent in Presidential elections.

Looked at a bit differently -- as the percentage of electorate that whites and black make up each cycle -- the gap is a bit larger than that. But it's certainly nowhere near the numbers identified by Research 2000. Their 'definitely/probably' electorate would be 80.4 percent white, 8.2 percent black, 9.5 percent Hispanic, and 2.0 percent 'other'. Contrast that to the situation in 2008, where the electorate was 74 percent white, and 13 percent black, and you can see why Democrats have such problems.

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The Speech Isn't the Story

I feel underqualified to talk about this one because I don't claim any expertise in the area of foreign policy and have rather ambivalent feelings toward American involvement in Afghanistan. But Obama's speech tonight, whether or not it produces some near-term move in Obama's approval ratings (and it could), is really not the big news of the day. Rather, it's the commitment the White House announced earlier to beginning to withdraw forces by July, 2011 as a condition of the surge.

Politically, this seems very risky: in the long run, there's much more downside to breaking the promise than there would be upside to keeping it. If nothing much has changed in Afghanistan and our troops aren't getting out 20 months hence, we can presumably expect some major blowback, especially from liberals -- a primary challenge from Obama's left flank would not be entirely out of the question.

Of course, it may be precisely because the withdraw timetable is so risky politically that it is in fact credible; a credible withdraw deadline is almost certainly better than a non-credible one, but whether or not it's better than not setting a deadline at all, I don't know. I certainly do hope that Obama set the deadline to achieve policy goals and not to quiesce liberals -- if this was intended purely as a political move, it was probably short-sighted.

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Responsibility, Means and Interests

Let me share some quick reactions to the president's Afghanistan speech as an admittedly non-military and non-foreign policy expert. I will try to stick closely to the political implications and possible public response to the policy announcement as Obama explained it from West Point tonight. I'll focus on a key, six-paragraph section at the end of the middle third of the speech, breaking it up into component parts:

These are the three core elements of our strategy: a military effort to create the conditions for a transition; a civilian surge that reinforces positive action; and an effective partnership with Pakistan.

It seems that in the choice between tilting either toward counterinsurgency or counterterrorism, as with most decisions Obama makes, the president wants to split it down the middle: doing some of both, with a civilian surge--akin, if you will, to a civil investiture to counter the counter-insurgency (presuming that will work), packaged with ramped up cooperation with Pakistan to work the areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan where the terrorist elements are hunkered down.

My main wonder here is how seriously Americans perceive the threat of a regrown terror network, or more to the point how much the investments and knotty implications of working with the Pakistanis will actually yield in terms of snuffing out terror networks in any once-and-forever way.

I recognize that there are a range of concerns about our approach. So let me briefly address a few of the prominent arguments that I have heard, and which I take very seriously.

First, there are those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam. They argue that it cannot be stabilized, and we are better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing. Yet this argument depends upon a false reading of history. Unlike Vietnam, we are joined by a broad coalition of 43 nations that recognizes the legitimacy of our action. Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency. And most importantly, unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan, and remain a target for those same extremists who are plotting along its border. To abandon this area now – and to rely only on efforts against al Qaeda from a distance – would significantly hamper our ability to keep the pressure on al Qaeda, and create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies.

Well, if this is the part of the speech to push back on the left wing elements in his party, I'm not too convinced. Saying something is not Vietnam is a soft case. Of course it's not. And the size and breadth of a coalition does not make or justify a strategy. Indeed, fighting in coalitions, as my colleague Patty Weitsman argues, often is more costly and complicated than its worth. I wonder, too, how many Americans feel that our Afghanistan investment looks even remotely like a proportional burden among allies.

Second, there are those who acknowledge that we cannot leave Afghanistan in its current state, but suggest that we go forward with the troops that we have. But this would simply maintain a status quo in which we muddle through, and permit a slow deterioration of conditions there. It would ultimately prove more costly and prolong our stay in Afghanistan, because we would never be able to generate the conditions needed to train Afghan Security Forces and give them the space to take over.

I think this is inarguable. What we're doing now is a waste--it's not working. We either need to do more or do less, or more of some things and less of others, or just something different.

Finally, there are those who oppose identifying a timeframe for our transition to Afghan responsibility. Indeed, some call for a more dramatic and open-ended escalation of our war effort – one that would commit us to a nation building project of up to a decade. I reject this course because it sets goals that are beyond what we can achieve at a reasonable cost, and what we need to achieve to secure our interests. Furthermore, the absence of a timeframe for transition would deny us any sense of urgency in working with the Afghan government. It must be clear that Afghans will have to take responsibility for their security, and that America has no interest in fighting an endless war in Afghanistan.

Immediately after the speech, you had Sen. John McCain and the Council of Foreign Relations' Richard Haass saying that setting a timeline or deadline is dangerous business. They have a point, Haass specifically arguing that Obama is betting that ramping up now will cost more in troops and money in the short term but save in the long term. What you have here, in both policy and political gambits, is the equivalent "surge" for Obama in Afghanistan to what Bush did with his surge in Iraq. I suppose violence is down in Iraq post-surge, but the long-term situation there isn't going to be any better as a result, is it? And although Obama's less-in-Iraq-means-more-for-Afghanistan argument is better than a more-in-both-countries further over-extension of our military and treasury, scaling back in Iraq is not in by itself a rationale for ramping up in Afghanistan. Failure at a lower cost-per-fatality, cost-per-casualty, cost-per-dollar-spent investment is still a bad return. What matters is whether this counterinsurgency strategy really can work. I'm still not sure it will, and given that the president's Afghan approval numbers are lower than his overall approval numbers, I wonder how many Americans believe it will work.

As President, I refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, our or interests.

Well, now. We are already living beyond on means in terms of spending outside our borders, not to mention what we're spending back home. Maybe Obama should have left "means" out of the equation, especially after making the politically-astute admission elsewhere in the speech that Americans are very likely thinking about how every dollar sent overseas is one less dollar that could be spent here. Responsibility? Well, we started in over there, so hard to dispute that. But "interests," well, that's the real question.

I'm not trying to get down on the president. He inherited this mess, one of many. He's right that Afghanistan, not Iraq, was the more justified war. He's right about the foolishly asymmetrical investments made in the past and to this day in Iraq relative to Afghanistan. And he's right that what we're doing now is just a long dead end and thus waste of resources. I guess I have to trust him and his military advisers when they tell us that a buffed-up counterinsurgency policy, coupled with a new pact with the Pakistanis, is actually going to work.

Like the punch line to the parable about the boy and the donkey that Gust Avrakatos, portrayed by Philip Seymor Hoffman in the movie version of Charlie Wilson's War, used to invoke, "We'll see."

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A Cop-Killer's Impact on 2012

Our deepest sympathies to the families of the four police officers -- Mark Renninger, Ronald Owens, Tina Griswold, and Greg Richardson -- who were brutally slain over the weekend by a felon named Maurice Clemmons. The story has taken on political dimensions with the revelation that Clemmons received clemency from then-Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee in 2000. Although the facts of the case are somewhat complicated -- Clemmons had received a 108-year sentence for offenses committed as a teenager, and after leaving Arkaansas, had subsequently fallen out of the grasp of the Washington State criminal justice system -- there are nevertheless a lot of fingers pointed at Huckabee.

What impact could the tragedy have on Huckabee's political future? I had previously developed a qualitative battery of questions, known as the EMPSCAT, which I periodically apply to matters such as these. The test, although hardly authoritative, suggests that the incident could indeed cause some damage to Huckabee's prospects.

1. Can the scandal be reduced to a one-sentence soundbyte (but not easily refuted/denied with a one-sentence soundbyte)?

Obviously yes. "Mike Huckabee released this scary black[**] dude from prison, and he went off and shot four police officers." This story has a visceral, human connection that will be hard for Huckabee to rebut, notwithstanding that the facts of the case are somewhat more complicated. And it's anyone's guess as to which of Huckabee's Republican opponents would be the first to use the Clemmons killings in a 30-second spot on the eve of a critical primary.

2. Does the scandal cut against a core element of the candidate's brand?

Not in the sense that it makes Huckabee look disingenuous or hypocritical -- which is what this question is generally getting at -- but in other ways it causes problems. Huckabee's brand is essentially that of the authentically compassionate conservative (that is not intended to sound ironic). But in the context of a Republican primary, his opponents will try to twist that theme into a negative, implying that Huckabee's "compassion" makes him a pushover, a rube, or (gasp!) perhaps even something of a closet liberal. In other words, Huckabee's opponents will try to cast him as "bleeding-heart conservative", rather than "compassionate conservative". The Clemmons case makes this line of attack considerably more challenging for Huckabee.

3. Does the scandal reify/reinforce/"prove" a core negative perception about the candidate, particularly one that had henceforth been difficult to articulate (but not one that has become so entrenched that little further damage can be done)?

See above -- Huckabee is already a candidate whose positives are also his negatives, and this incident tends to exacerbate that. Also, since there have been questions about some of Huckabee's previous pardons -- particularly that of the rapist Wayne DuMond -- people will assert that there's a pattern here.

4. Can the scandal readily be employed by the opposition, without their looking hypocritical/petty/politically incorrect, risking retribution, or giving life to a damaging counter-narrative?

In the context of a Republican primary, probably yes, unless one of Huckabee's opponents -- most of whom will also be ex-governors -- have similar skeletons in the closet. Particularly since the issue is (ostensibly) not a personal, ad-hominem attack, but rather a direct and tangible indictment of his competency as his state's chief executive, it can probably be used somewhat liberally by his opponents (although they'll need to be somewhat sensitive to a perception that they've exploited the tragedy for political gain).

Were Huckabee to make it to the general election, the issue becomes somewhat dicier, as Democrats could look hypocritical for trying to 'Dukakis' him, and the racial narrative lurking beneath the surface of the Clemmons case might be riskier for an African-American candidate to employ. But Huckabee, obviously, needs to get through the nomination process first.

5. Is the media bored, and/or does the story have enough tabloid/shock value to crowd out all other stories?

This question is more intended for when a scandal develops during the heat of a campaign, and not during the long, cold war that precedes it. For the time being, the story has received a moderate, but not overwhelming, amount of attention. More importantly, it has enough tabloid value that it can be probably counted on to re-surface at some point during the primary campaign. If Huckabee is lucky, this would happen in a controlled setting such as during a debate -- in which case he'll have two years to start preparing his rebuttal. If he's unlucky, it will be at the behest of one of his opponents, perhaps as a result of additional facts uncovered by opposition research, and will be deployed (such as through a leak to Drudge or Politico) at a time when it might do maximum damage.

***

In summary, I think this is in fact somewhat damaging to Huckabee, and could tangibly affect his odds of winning the 2012 nomination. It might also impact his desire to run for office. Over the winter, I had heard from a reasonably well-connected insider that Hucakbee was somewhat more likely to wait until 2016 to run, and Huckabee himself had recently claimed to be leaning against a 2012 bid. The 2016 race, indeed, could be a better bet for Huckabee on several levels: he won't have to run against an incumbent; Sarah Palin will probably have burned herself out; the current, strongly libertarian brand of economic populism (which does not play to Huckabee's more communitarian leanings) is liable to have faded, and the impact of the Clemmons killings, such as it is, may be somewhat diminished.

Something else which the incident not so much caused but revealed is that Huckabee is not particularly well-liked in the conservative blogopshere; many of the blogs were perfectly happy to throw him under the bus. Although Huckabee's part of the Republican base does not overlap heavily with the well-educated and well-informed blog-reading crowd, the blogs are nevertheless important players in shaping the narrative about a candidate, and so could cause some 'trickle-down' damage to his chances.

Increasingly, I tend to see the 2012 nomination fight as one between Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, and X, where X is somebody who may not be receiving a lot of attention right now (not someone like Tim Pawlenty or Newt Gingirch, who receive more than their fair share, and who are satellites in the Romney and Palin orbits, respectively). Huckabee's odds have fallen from about 11 percent to 8 percent over at Intrade, which feels like a reasonable assessment.


[**] I certainly do not mean to imply that the Huckabee's critics have intentionally or unintentionally played up the racial elements of this case (they categorically haven't). But the fact is that to a certain part of the electorate, race and crime are intimately linked, and the fact that Clemmons is black and killed four white police officers will give the matter some additional resonance with them. Needless to say, we are not a color-blind nation.

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